Bank of America tells customers not to give AI agents their banking password
Bank of America emailed customers urging them never to share their username and password with an outside service, including an AI tool or agent that offers to act on their behalf, and reminded them they are responsible for activity from shared credentials. A spokesperson confirmed the email to TechCrunch on October 27.
Bank of America sent customers an email titled "Protecting your finances in the AI World" urging them never to share their username and password with "another person or an outside service," including "an AI-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf," TechCrunch reported on October 27. The email adds that customers who do share credentials should keep in mind that "you're responsible for activity resulting from that access." A Bank of America spokesperson confirmed the email is authentic. TechCrunch listed the risks: an assistant moving money without the customer knowing, the bank locking the account as a suspected takeover, or a flaw in the assistant leaking the credentials. It also said banks, payment providers and processors are still working out how to let customers use AI tools for account access, and that most bank account agreements already hold customers responsible for anyone they give their login to.
Why it matters
Handing an agent a password is the oldest anti-pattern in delegation. The agent becomes indistinguishable from the customer, holds every permission the customer has, and cannot be revoked without changing the password. It is the problem OAuth was created to solve: letting an app act for a user without ever seeing the user's password.
The answer for banks is to give agents a sanctioned path: scoped, revocable, short-lived tokens issued through OAuth with the customer's consent, so the agent acts on the customer's behalf rather than as them, and activity can be told apart. Rich authorization requests let that grant name a specific payee or amount, and token exchange lets an agent trade it for narrower tokens downstream. The Agent Identity Standards Map 2026 tracks where those standards stand, and our guide to securing AI agent identities covers the controls.
Source: TechCrunch
Related on Start with Identity
- BlogKantara risk group says AI agents need their own identity risk framework, not an extension of the human one
Kantara Initiative's Digital Identity Risk group found that agentic AI needs a separate risk framework from its human-focused taxonomy, naming orphaned agent id
- BlogNorthflank tells customers to assume every environment variable was decrypted after AI keys are abused
After a Wiz alert on October 30, cloud platform Northflank told customers to assume all environment variables were decrypted and rotate every key. Customers the
- BlogPassword manager mSecure tells users to change passwords and remove passkeys, without saying what happened
mSecure's developer emailed current and former customers on November 3 about suspicious activity linked to the password manager, advising them to change passwor
- CVEFreeIPA idp-add evaluates input before checking the caller's rights
Any authenticated FreeIPA principal could push --organization or --base-url values into an eval() call that ran before the access check, reading the server proc
- CVEKeycloak authorization bypass
Keycloak failed an authorization check, so a caller could reach a resource their role should have blocked. Part of the April 2024 RHSA-2024:1868 set with CVE-20
- CVEKeycloak UMA policy privilege escalation
Keycloak's UMA policy engine checked only the first resource in a request (CWE-266). Additional resources skipped the check. A privilege escalation in user-mana